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Robert Alan Dahl (; December 17, 1915 – February 5, 2014) was a political theorist and Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He established the pluralist theory of democracy—in which political outcomes are enacted through competitive, if unequal, interest groups—and introduced "polyarchy" as a descriptor of actual democratic governance. An originator of "empirical theory" and known for advancing behavioralist characterizations of political power, Dahl's research focused on the nature of decisionmaking in actual institutions, such as American cities. Dahl is considered one of the most influential political social scientists of the twentieth century, and has been described as "the dean of American political scientists." Dahl received his Ph.D. at Yale in 1940 and served on its political science faculty from 1946 to 1986. His influential early books include ''A Preface to Democratic Theory'' (1956), ''Who Governs?'' (1961), and ''Pluralist Democracy in the United States'' (1967), which presented pluralistic explanations for political rule in the United States. He was elected president of the American Political Science Association in 1966. ==Writings== In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he was involved in an academic disagreement with C. Wright Mills over the nature of politics in the United States. Mills held that America's governments are in the grasp of a unitary and demographically narrow power elite. Dahl responded that there are many different elites involved, who have to work both in contention and in compromise with one another. If this is not democracy in a populist sense, Dahl contended, it is at least polyarchy (or pluralism). In perhaps his best known work, ''Who Governs?'' (1961), he examines the power structures (both formal and informal) in the city of New Haven, Connecticut, as a case study, and finds that it supports this view. From the late 1960s onwards, his conclusions were challenged by scholars such as G. William Domhoff and Charles E. Lindblom (a friend and colleague of Dahl).〔G. William Domhoff, ''Who really rules?: New Haven and community power reexamined'' (Transaction Books, 1978).〕〔David Vogel, ''Fluctuating fortunes: The political power of business in America'' (2003)〕 In ''How Democratic Is the American Constitution?'' (2001) Dahl argued that the US Constitution is much less democratic than it ought to be, given that its authors were operating from a position of "profound ignorance" about the future. However, he adds that there is little or nothing that can be done about this "short of some constitutional breakdown, which I neither foresee nor, certainly, wish for." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Robert A. Dahl」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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